The idea that Christians should respond to, and sometimes learn from, secular movements was a feature of the modernising wave that swept through the Catholic church in the 1960s. In his 1963 encyclical letter, Pacem in Terris, Pope John XXIII identified the growing role of women in public life and the end of colonialism as two progressive developments carrying a religious, eschatological significance. Sixty or so years later, as it seeks to deal with contemporary “signs of the times”, certain sections of the Church of England are struggling to show a similar openness and humility.
Last month, an ecclesiastical court refused to grant a request by Jesus College, Cambridge, to remove a memorial plaque from its chapel to Tobias Rustat – a 17th-century slave trader and notable benefactor to the college. The petition was led by Sonita Alleyne, the first black master of an Oxbridge college, who said that the memorial’s presence was having a negative impact on worship in the chapel and alienating a diverse student body. As the Anglican communion seeks to atone for historic links to the transatlantic slave trade, here was an opportunity to demonstrate that penitence and reflection could lead to concrete action.
